| 18 | Lucid | Wandering |

90: The Way She Loves (drabble) v2

I see into her eyes, the windows to her soul, and I know that she does not love me like I love her. She’ll never tell me that she loves me. She’ll always allow me to say it to her first, but she’ll never repeat the same words back to me. In her eyes, all I can see, written in black ink over the dismembered parts of her soul, are the words “emotionally detached”.

The words ring like a bell in my head, always, all the time, permanently. Emotionally detached, emotionally detached, emotionally detached. I love her. Can she see that, or is she willing herself to deny what is in front of her?

What if I left her today, tomorrow, next week, whenever? Would she react like a saddened lover would? I always think about this, but her coy smile and the flicker of happiness in her expression always derails my logical train of thought, simultaneously brings out the best and worst in me. I love her.

She probably doesn’t love me, and that hurts. Sometimes at night, I lie awake and I think about what I saw in her eyes as I held her close. The words “emotionally detached” awakens in me a shattering ball of melancholia and sadness which starts in my chest and eventually spreads to the rest of my body, numbing me like an anaesthetic. It makes tears gather on the edge of my eyelids, waiting to fall, waiting to crawl down the sides of my face into my hair or wherever I want them to go.

She’ll do everything to make me think that in her own way, she loves me too. She’ll flirt, she’ll promise, she’ll protect, she’ll do whatever she can to bury my real thoughts of her, bury the truth, bury the realness of everything here. She’ll always wonder if I know, if I know about what she’s really doing. One day, I’ll have to tell her. I’ll have to tell her that I hate the way she loves me, the way she loves me isn’t the way I’d love her, or anyone, for that matter.